Arena did not seize authority — it inherited it by default. The industry's self-measurement infrastructure collapsed under the weight of its own incentive structure: leaderboard positions justified valuations, valuations pressured labs to optimize for leaderboards, and optimization for leaderboards eventually meant the models were training on the tests. The moment OpenAI quietly stopped reporting SWE-bench Verified scores, the pretense that labs could objectively measure their own progress dissolved. was not a revelation to anyone paying attention — it was confirmation of…